A Call to Use FriendFeed Rooms for WWDC Keynote

Date June 5, 2008

I covered FriendFeed rooms already and I think it’s a good addition to an already successful system at FriendFeed. Yesterday, FriendFeed rolled out new features for FriendFeed rooms.

FriendFeed Blog

One of these features is pretty significant: Semi-public rooms. Semi-public rooms allow an administrator of a room to have control over the posts within a room, but the public can view and comment.

Apple Developer Connection - Worldwide Developers Conference 2008

Monday, June 9th is a big day in the Apple world: The World Wide Developers Conference, or WWDC. A common tactic in the community is to “live blog” the announcements as they happen. Sites such as Engadget, Macrumors, TUAW, and Ars Technica have become popular destinations to get the latest product announcements from Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC and other conferences. These sites use cool AJAX techniques as well as old school mechanisms such as IRC (which is my preference).

To all these sites who are covering WWDC and will be live-blogging, I offer this suggestion: Use FriendFeed rooms.

FriendFeed is a perfect atmosphere for promoting and elevating discussion. Your administrators can post a status update, and tons of users can comment on each update. By using semi-public rooms, you have total control over the room including moderation of comments. I feel this will change the way we follow live events. Engadget, Macrumors, Ars, TUAW, or anyone else out there who may read this, please consider using FriendFeed rooms for Monday’s keynote. You will be happy you did.

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  • June 5, 2008 at 1:05 pm Bwana McCall
    I really hope one of the bigger blogs does this.
  • June 5, 2008 at 1:26 pm Louis Gray
    MacRumors Live has always done a great job the last few years. Combined with Engadget, there's little to be missed.
  • June 5, 2008 at 1:29 pm Alex Sauceda
    Engadget coverage is great!
  • June 5, 2008 at 1:29 pm Jigar Mehta
    Has anybody created any room for this yet?
  • June 5, 2008 at 1:30 pm Bwana McCall
    Every year I revert to IRC since the websites continue to have issues. Macrumors has done the best to adapt, but they are generally 15-30 minutes behind which is a lifetime during a keynote.
  • June 5, 2008 at 1:41 pm Mike Wills
    Please do this... I will watch... I promise...
  • June 5, 2008 at 1:43 pm Bwana McCall
    Ryan Block just commented that someone has squatted the Engadget room name and the FriendFeed guys haven't responded yet. He is however considering it
  • June 5, 2008 at 3:54 pm OnDemand Beat
    Bwana, The one thing I am trying to figure out with the room I have created for next weeks Enterprise 2.0 conference is how do you get all the conversation into One room or a couple of rooms so that the conversation is not fractured ala Twitter? What if for WWDC next Monday 20 rooms were created for the conference. Would not prefer that activity take place in one room....
  • June 5, 2008 at 4:16 pm Daniel Shaw
    Great idea. We'll see if it holds up better than Twitter.
  • June 5, 2008 at 4:19 pm Mark Trapp
    Ameed, it's going to happen even if you did it the traditional way. For example, each Apple Keynote with Steve Jobs generally tends to have several journalistic/blogging outfits liveblogging: MacRumors, Gizmodo, Engadget, MacWorld, et al. To get a good discussion, however, you need to have someone with some authority on the subject doing it: I'm sure there are dozens of others liveblogging the events, but those 4 get most of the traffic because they have an established reader base.
  • June 5, 2008 at 4:19 pm Mark Trapp
    Which is why it's pretty cool that Ryan Block was considering Friendfeed: he would bring with him much of Engadget's readerbase. Edit: Looks like Friendfeed is giving the room to Ryan and Engadget: awesome.
  • June 5, 2008 at 4:37 pm directeur
    Isn't this a risk to have load that should be handled by the websites rather than a shared tool like this one? I mean the big websites you cite can handle this load during events like keynotes on their own blog... it's after all the concept of "I produce - You consume"
  • June 7, 2008 at 2:12 am Logical Extremes
    I've started a FriendFeed room called "Stevenote". It's public to encourage reporting-discussion-analysis, though I'd consider making it semi-public and co-administered if a top-tier personality wanted to liveblog directly in this room. For now, there are some links of interest for WWDC 2008, including links for major liveblogging sites. Feel free to add to it... http://friendfeed.com/rooms/stevenote
  • June 7, 2008 at 11:09 am Bwana McCall
    I'll be sure to check it out Logical Extremes
  • June 8, 2008 at 7:32 pm Bwana McCall
    Thank you Venturebeat! http://friendfeed.com/rooms/venturebeat-wwdc-livestream
  • June 8, 2008 at 7:39 pm MG Siegler
    @bwana - you bet. it's going to be a lot of fun i think and a really good way to spread the info quickly -- and of course have a conversation about it!
  • June 8, 2008 at 7:44 pm Nathaniel Payne
    I think that will be the biggest benefit of using the FF rooms for big conferences and events. Discussions can pop up around individual pieces of news as they occur. Can't do that with an enormous live-blog post (at least not easily).

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